We are pleased to announce that Professor Ángeles Donoso Macaya (BMCC and CUNY Graduate Center) will join The Center for the Humanities as a Faculty Fellow during the Fall 2023 semester.
As the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research 2020-2024 draws to a close, we at the Center for the Humanities look forward to collaborating with Ángeles on their work to produce capstone research and engagement related to Archives in Common.
During her time as Faculty Fellow, Ángeles will coordinate the completion and launch of The Sisters of the Milpa a bilingual and indigenous (Mixteco) cookbook series with the mutual-aid kitchen La Morada, and enhance the Archives in Common project website.
Besides this ongoing work with Archives in Common, Ángeles will also help organize collective storytelling workshops, and begin digitizing an archive containing a collection of over 200 documents from Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, entrusted to Ángeles and to her colleague, Professor César Barros A. from SUNY New Paltz, by retired CCNY faculty Carol Smith, who passed away last year.
We also want to take this opportunity to congratulate Ángeles for her recent achievements—the co-organizer of Cátedra Expandida, Visualidades e Imaginación Radical, Attavesar los 50 años, a major interdisciplinary symposium that took place in Santiago, Chile on August 2, 3, 4 to commemorate the 50 years of the civic-military coup on September 11, 1973 (photos and videos of this major event can be found on their Instagram page); the publication of two books, imperfect archive and Lanallwe; and her upcoming invited Keynote lecture at Arizona State University in October.
About the books:
ARCHIVO IMPERFECTO / IMPERFECT ARCHIVE
archivo imperfecto / imperfect archive (published by Metales Pesados in July 2023), a bilingual photo essay made in collaboration with Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz (National Visual Arts Prize 2017). This publication was made possible thanks to a FONDART Artistic Grant, an award given by the Consejo Nacional de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio (the National Council for the Cultures, Arts, and Patrimony). Imperfect archive was launched on July 28, 2023, at the National Arts Museum, in Santiago. Visual arts scholar and critic Rita Ferrer, and feminist scholar Lucía Egaña presented the book, along with the authors, Ángeles and Paz—we shared a few photos below, an interview (in Spanish) which was published on August 31, 2023 in the Culture section of El Mercurio newspaper.
Here, a video interview (in Spanish) Paz and Ángeles made in January 2023, for the inauguration of the exhibition archivo imperfecto at Casa del Arte Diego Rivera.
LANALLWE
The second book is Lanallwe (Tusquets), an autobiographical essay that connects photographic emulsions, the flow of water, the grain of wood, paper and memory. From the publisher: “From a series of inherited snapshots, the narrator of Lanallwe tries to reconstruct the story –or rather “her” story— of the lake house where she spent most of her childhood summers. Searching, questioning and interpreting what is seen and hidden in these photographs, a powerful memory exercise is displayed —and a reckoning with it— where multiple voices come together to bring back to the present the waters of the family biography and those of collective history: the territorial dispossession of the Mapuche people.”
Lanallwe was launched in Santiago, on August 2; Mapuche writer and scholar Claudio Alvarado Lincopi joined Ángeles for this launching, which took place at Café Literario Providencia.
Here a link to a recent interview (in Spanish) with Culto from La Tercera
About the Keynote lecture:
Ángeles was invited to give the Inaugural David William Foster Memorial Key Note Lecture at Arizona State University on October 17, 2023. “The David William Foster Memorial Lecture series invites scholars to speak on themes of Latin American theater, film, photography, translation, and literature, to honor the memory and work of Arizona State University’s Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, David William Foster (1940-2020). Foster became an ASU Regents Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies — the highest faculty honor at ASU — in 1991 and continued to teach at ASU until his passing in 2020. Foster contributed to many fields, from Brazilian studies to Jewish studies, held teaching appointments in several countries, and supported generations of students."
